She Goes From The Ground Up To Give Home A New Life

May 4, 1985|By Susanne Hupp of The Sentinel Staff

When interior designer Joyce Appelquist first met with her clients in January 1984, their Seminole County home was a typical 1972 four-bedroom ranchhouse filled with a 15-year collection of traditional furnishings and decorated in 1972 oranges and greens.

After a lengthy and harrowing refurbishing -- the owners say the improvements are worth it but they ''never again'' want to go through that -- the house is anything but typical, the furnishings decidedly untraditional and the colors the whites, the pinks and greens of 1985. (The owners did not want their names used for security reasons.)

The house's owners embarked on the project, says Appelquist, a Winter Park designer, because a leaking water pipe was forcing them to replace a large section of the tile floor anyway and they decided they wanted a whole new look. Their children were grown, their needs had changed and they were tired of the old stuff. They would sell everything and start over.

Appelquist's assignment: 1) give the house an up-to-date image and 2) figure out furniture arrangements so that the living room and smallish dining room would comfortably seat 10 people.

The first step was the choosing of colors to set the scheme for the whole house. From a swatch of hand-painted raw silk, the owners chose turquoise, black, gray, pinky peach and cream.

Because all of the comfortable seating places would, if done in color or a print, take up too much room visually, Appelquist decided that the medium- sized living room would be basically white with accents in the green, peach, gray and black taken from the print fabric. (That fabric eventually was used on sofa pillows.) The same colors were used in an abstract design hand- painted on white canvas for the sitting-area sofas.

Heavy draperies and sheers would be replaced with simple cornices covered with quilted white silk so that the sliding glass doors offered a clear view of pool and patio.

The dining room was painted a glamorous deep blue-green and the chairs were upholstered -- completely upholstered for maximum comfort -- in a flamestitch pattern of cream and blue-greens in graduating shades. To give the dining room a more open feeling, Appelquist removed a wall separating the dining room from the entryway and asked glasscutter Gary Carruthers to create an etched glass table top over a glass base that would seem to float in space.

After two months of preparation (which included the sale of most of the old furnishings), eight months of construction (which entailed raising the floor of the sunken living room, knocking out walls, rewiring, replacing tile floors, gutting the kitchen, remodeling bathrooms, building a bathroom where a bedroom was), and two more months of furnishing and decorating, the transformation was complete.

The children's former play room became a luxurious cream, apricot and turquoise family room accented with a magnificent fireplace wall of black Formica and marble. The carpet takes its motif and colors from an abstract painting over the fireplace.

The pinkish-peach of the sofa pillows was carried through the bedroom wing of the house, where it evolved in the youngest daughter's room into pink, in the college-age daughter's room into a deep pink lavender and in the master bedroom into a luscious plum. That suite was enlarged -- almost doubled -- by incorporating the former fourth bedroom, which was fitted with sleek plum mica built-ins, luxurious bathroom appointments, marble countertops, Jacuzzi and stained glass window over the tub.

The owners report that their house's new look is just what they hoped it would be -- perfect for their lifestyle today -- with plenty of room for entertaining friends and family.